| #### Chapter 10 |

| #### #### But how can I form the conception of the sizelessness of Matter? #### How do you form the concept of any absence of quality? What is the Act of the Intellect, what is the mental approach, in such a case? #### The secret is Indetermination. Likeness knows its like: the indeterminate knows the indeterminate. Around this indefinite a definite conception will be realized, but the way lies through indefiniteness. #### All knowledge comes by Reason and the Intellectual Act; in this case Reason conveys information in any account it gives, but the act which aims at being intellectual is, here, not intellection but rather its failure: therefore the representation of Matter must be spurious, unreal, something sprung of the Alien, of the unreal, and bound up with the alien reason. #### This is Plato's meaning where he says that Matter is apprehended by a sort of spurious reasoning. #### What, then, is this indetermination in the Soul? Does it amount to an utter absence of Knowledge, as if the Soul or Mind had withdrawn? #### No: the indeterminate has some footing in the sphere of affirmation. The eye is aware of darkness as a base capable of receiving any colour not yet seen against it: so the Mind, putting aside all attributes perceptible to sense- all that corresponds to light- comes upon a residuum which it cannot bring under determination: it is thus in the state of the eye which, when directed towards darkness, has become in some way identical with the object of its spurious vision. #### There is vision, then, in this approach of the Mind towards Matter? #### Some vision, yes; of shapelessness, of colourlessness, of the unlit, and therefore of the sizeless. More than this would mean that the Soul is already bestowing Form. #### But is not such a void precisely what the Soul experiences when it has no intellection whatever? #### No: in that case it affirms nothing, or rather has no experience: but in knowing Matter, it has an experience, what may be described as the impact of the shapeless; for in its very consciousness of objects that have taken shape and size it knows them as compounds [i.e., as possessing with these forms a formless base] for they appear as things that have accepted colour and other quality. #### It knows, therefore, a whole which includes two components; it has a clear Knowledge or perception of the overlie [the Ideas] but only a dim awareness of the underlie, the shapeless which is not an Ideal-Principle. #### With what is perceptible to it there is presented something else: what it can directly apprehend it sets on one side as its own; but the something else which Reason rejects, this, the dim, it knows dimly, this, the dark, it knows darkly, this it knows in a sort of non-knowing. #### And just as even Matter itself is not stably shapeless but, in things, is always shaped, the Soul also is eager to throw over it the thing-form; for the Soul recoils from the indefinite, dreads, almost, to be outside of reality, does not endure to linger about Non-Being. ####  |